“Don’t you mind, Simon; I told you that the Missus’ ladies, them she was nurse two years ago, are coming down with their children to stay some while at the farm. There! if they were all live princes and princesses the mistress couldn’t fuss more about them. My word! Simon; the cakes, and the pies, and the jams, and the junkets are something to see.”
“Is it boys or gals that is coming?” asked Simon, with a note of alarm in his voice. “Be they young, or the middlin’ mischieevious age?”
“Oh! that I can’t tell yer; they be all sorts, I think.”
“Mussey me! boys an’ girls an’ all sorts,” cried the old shepherd; and, as if to make preparation at once against the approaching foe, he whistled to his equally ancient dog, who was making an exhaustive examination of a bare veal knucklebone, and tottered towards the meadows.
But Simon’s heart was not the only one which, amongst all the pleasant stir of preparation at the farm, was filled with alarm at the thought of the impending visitors.
One Gaston Delzant, a small, black-haired, black-eyed French boy, aged seven, was literally trembling within his patent leather shoes at the prospect of the coming guests.
He had not been long in England, and though the healthy life at Gaybrook, and Mrs. Busson’s fostering care had worked wonders in strengthening the feeble little creature, Gaston still looked, as the burly farmer declared, “just a poor little snip of a frog-fed Frenchy.”
“Don’t talk that sort of unfeeling way, Busson, before the child,” his wife had admonished him, “for, don’t you make any mistake, though he’s slow to speak, he understands sharp enough all that he hears.”
Indeed, so far as poor Gaston’s peace of mind was concerned, this was only too true.
He understood so perfectly all that the maids said, as they interchanged their fears that the young gentlemen from school would teaze him out of his senses, that on the day of their arrival, Gaston was wildly planning some means of escape from the farm.